Tagged: regulation

The Barack Obama Administration’s Thursday Internet uber-power grab is awful for just about every American. It will lead to dramatically more expensive Web access – because of both raised service costs and huge new taxes.

Man-made climate change alarmists continue to be caught revising history. There is a simple concept that continues to be on display here: If present reality, facts and figures aren’t cooperating with your desired goal, just change them to fit your desired outcome. “Fiddling” with temperature data is the biggest science scandal to date, and one of the least reported by the main stream media.

The Obama administration’s attack on America’s energy sector is insane. They might as well tell us what to eat. Oh, wait, Michelle Obama is doing that. Or that the Islamic State is not Islamic. Oh, wait, Barack Obama said that.

John Stossel spoke of being trained as a liberal consumer reporter. Believing rules were needed because life was complex, Stossel whole heartedly endorsed regulations, only to watch them fail. As to the The Department of Consumer Affairs, Stossel spoke about licensing requirement for repair shops. Licensing, however, didn’t protect customers. 30 years later repair shops, despite being licensed, were still fooling consumers and not giving consumers what they were promised to expect.

This is the political Santa who delivers subsidies of various sorts to farmers or “alternative energy” manufacturers. The Santa who redistributes vast sums of money for educational expenditures, or public housing, welfare and food stamps, or government defense contracts, and even “bridges to nowhere.”

Late on Thanksgiving eve, when no one was paying attention, the Obama administration released its regulatory roadmap of thousands of regulations being finalized in 2015. Within the bundle of more than 3000 regulations lies a rule on ozone that President Obama himself, in 2011, “put on ice” in effort to reduce “regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.” Regarding the 2011 decision that shocked environmental groups, the New York Times (NYT) recently stated: “At the time, Mr. Obama said the regulation would impose too severe a burden on industry and local governments at a time of economic distress.”

Republican lawmakers are pushing hard to corral President Obama’s rogue Environmental Protection Agency with stringent bills and a blunt warning against finalizing its most dangerous land grab ever, the pending redefinition of “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, which would seize power over almost any property that gets wet regardless of what it is or who owns it.

Co-Director of Heartland’s Center on the Digital Economy, Jim Lakely discusses Net Neutrality with guest host Mike Siegel on the Howie Carr Show. Siegel and Lakely talk about the latest Net Neutrality news and what it would mean for the Internet.

Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. Over the last decade, the FCC has alleged only a few potential net neutrality problems, and in each of these few cases, the FCC was able to satisfactorily resolve them without Title II authority.

The FCC is considering administratively bypassing Congress and unilaterally reversing longstanding U.S. Internet policy in law with an administrative maneuver that could have sweeping and unintended negative consequences for U.S. trade and foreign policy.

Just in time for the holiday season, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is gearing up what can only be called a “war on fun,” persecuting legitimate foreign and domestic businesses for selling legal products to consumers, under the guise of protecting children.

Nothing has changed my mind that it would be “unthinkable” for the FCC to classify Internet service providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, the part of the 1934 communications law derived directly from the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The purpose of the Interstate Commerce Act was to constrain what was then seen as the monopolistic power of the railroads. The railroads were deregulated in the 1980s – long before the emergence today’s broadband Internet providers.

October 25th marked the 247th birthday of one of the greatest voices of liberty, the French political philosopher of freedom, Benjamin Constant. He may not be a household name to friends of freedom today, but he should be. He wrote one of the most principled and consistent defenses of individual liberty and freedom of enterprise to appear in the last two hundred years, the Principles of Politics Applied to All Governments (1815).

Over a scholarly career that has spanned a half a century, Kirzner has enriched our understanding of the theory of the competitive process, the role of the entrepreneur in bringing about market coordination and innovation, the nature of capital and interest, the dangers resulting from the regulated economy, and the importance of individual freedom for the open-ended creativity that enhances the general human condition.